Diego F. Torres

Diego F. Torres

Institut de Ciències de l'Espai

Experimental Sciences & Mathematics

I was born in Buenos Aires, where I studied up to obtaining my doctoral degree in physics from the National University at La Plata, working on cosmology and astrophysics of extended gravitational theories. After several years in fellowships around the world, I moved to the Institute of Space Sciences to start a research group on high-energy astrophysics. My research focuses on compact objects and cosmic rays. I have received several scientific awards  including the Chinese Academy of Science Senior Visiting Professorship, the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Award of the Humboldt Foundation of Germany, the Shakti Duggal Award on Cosmic Ray Physics of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and several others. I became Director of the Institute of Space Sciences in March 2016.

 


Research interests

The familiar sights of peacefully shining stars would be replaced by something extreme and variable should you look with gamma-ray eyes. You would be glancing at the most energetic phenomena known in astrophysics: accreting masses around black holes, pulsars, close binaries, regions of stellar formation, explosions of supernovae, and others. I develop theoretical models for these scenarios, and test them with observations using ground-based telescopes and satellites. My research focuses on compact objects and cosmic rays. My earlier research includes gravitation and cosmology; particularly, scalar-tensor theories and non-minimal couplings, scalar dark matter, boson stars, gravitational lensing, and wormholes. I published several papers on all these topics. My research group hosted about 40 scientists since its foundation in 2006. You can know more about all this, including links to my publicatoins, from my webpage,  https://sites.google.com/view/dft-research

Selected publications

Torres DF, Lin T & Coti Zelati F 2019, ‘Towards observing reverberating and superefficient pulsar wind nebulae’, Monthly Notices Of The Royal Astronomical Society, 486, 1, 1019 – 1033.

– Papitto A, Ambrosino F, Stella L, Torres DF, Coti Zelati F, Ghedina A, Meddi F, Sanna A, Casella P, Dallilar Y, Eikenberry S, Israel GL, Onori F, Piranomonte S, Bozzo E, Burderi L, Campana S, de Martino D, Di Salvo T, Ferrigno C, Rea N, Riggio A, Serrano S, Veledina A & Zampieri L 2019, ‘Pulsating in Unison at Optical and X-Ray Energies: Simultaneous High Time Resolution Observations of the Transitional Millisecond Pulsar PSR J1023+0038‘, Astrophysical Journal, 882, 2, 104.

Torres DF, Vigano D, Coti Zelati F & Li J 2019, ‘Synchrocurvature modelling of the multifrequency non-thermal emission of pulsars’, Monthly Notices Of The Royal Astronomical Society, 489, 4, 5494 – 5512.

– Viganò D & Torres DF 2019, ‘A novel approach for the analysis of the geometry involved in determining light curves of pulsars‘, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 490, Issue 1, p.1437-1450.


Selected research activities

-Published 11 international journals papers this year (of which I selected just a few as examples), plus several others with large collaborations.

-Have been Director of the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE, CSIC), a position I have since April 2016.

-Continued to be a member of Fermi-LAT and the Cherenkov Telescope Array.

-I am Editor-in-Chief, Journal of High Energy Astrophysics, Elsevier, since 2013

-Continued to organize the Sant Cugat Forum on Astrophysics.

-Have been an evaluator for projects or promotions of several countries and a peer reviewer for several astrophysical journals.